Advice and act

Tridense provides clients with advice as well as assistance. We separate sense from nonsense, doing only what is necessary and useful. In the normal state of affairs, we serve primarily as advisers. We constantly keep track of the situation by monitoring it in various ways. If necessary, we take appropriate action to deal with an issue.

Our various roles are determined by the agreements made with the client. They’re established and described in the Family Security and Privacy Programme (FSPP) we’ve compiled for our clients. With this, the client defines the area we are authorised to operate in and report on. This ensures that the ‘what’, the ‘who’, and the ‘why’ are always clear to all involved.

Our philosophy of security

The FSPP is the ‘letter of credentials’ we present to our clients. It’s an encapsulation of our experience and expertise, based on the philosophy of protection we’ve developed over the years.

Our philosophy is based on the following principles: in order to adequately protect our clients in their private lives, we must take control of three symbolic ‘gates’. These gates represent the physical, digital, and social ways to access our clients’ private environment. By ensuring coherence between the three types of ‘gatekeeping’, we achieve optimal access control.

The physical gate represents traditional access points to the private environment (estates, residences, places of work). The digital gate provides access to our clients’ private and professional IT environment. The social gate (‘payroll-access’) symbolises the process of recruitment and selection employees must undergo before being allowed to work in our clients’ inner circle. Securing this gate includes supervising, assessing, and vetting employees throughout their period of employment, up to and including termination of employment.

Our focus on securing these three gates is connected to the three phases of security risk management: prevention, detection, and reaction.

Prevention involves actively and purposefully undertaking measures and activities to prevent undesirable events and situations.

Detection involves detecting signs of incidents that will or may occur as early as possible.

Reaction involves taking immediate, appropriate, and well-prepared action if incidents do occur.

Realistic and shared understanding

The three gates on the horizontal axis and the three phases on the vertical axis together form our ‘matrix of protection’. In consultation with the client, we ‘plot’ all measures and arrangements that are desired or deemed necessary. The resulting set of measures can be adapted to risk developments, preventing both overestimation and underestimation. This process provides insight into the necessity and usefulness of the measures. It also helps us answer the eternal question ‘how safe is safe enough?’ In this way, the client can always form his own good judgment about how ‘efforts and costs relate to the risks to be controlled’.

A personal and confidential meeting can be arranged, in which we elaborate on the FSPP and what it can mean for our clients’ well-being.

Areas of work and expertise

A high level of security (Family Security) is achieved by combining measures and facilities in a variety of areas. The right things must receive the right attention from the right people at the right time. The risk issue is often recalcitrant and its management often requires a broader view and coherent measures. The art of our profession lies precisely in establishing that coherence. The result is a well thought-out and realistic plan with which the problems are discovered and dealt with, preferably at the earliest stage.

We tell you more about how we do this in personal conversations. We don’t do that on this website for ‘obvious reasons’. Not to make it more exciting or larger than it is, but the truly interested reader will understand that.

Below we therefore suffice with mentioning a number of our areas of expertise on the basis of which we arrive at this coherent approach.

Protection of Personal Privacy (Family Security)

Within Single Family Offices, risk management on the traditional core tasks is often organized at the highest professional level. Precisely for this reason, it is extraordinary to find that this is often not the case with regard to what the family holds most dear: their personal lives and their personal safety. Sometimes it is downright disconcerting to find out how poorly wealthy families have protected themselves against malicious persons and related crime scenarios. Both in the physical and digital realities.  One cause of this is often the perception of the security measures that come to mind. Anxiety about the freedom-restricting measures and the suspected breaches of privacy often nip the substantive discussion in the bud. Tridense advocates measures that actually promote freedom and pre-eminently enhance privacy. We advise in the understanding of the risk reality and the establishment of a solid Family Security and Privacy program. A program that leads to effective risk management and adds value to the well-being of the family. From generation to generation and in the physical, digital and personal reality.

Protection of privacy and reputation

Privacy is a core value within our vision of Family Security. In fact, in our clients’ experience, concepts of privacy and security are largely overlapping. Any invasion of privacy affects the sense of security. In fact, the same applies the other way around. In a legal sense, it concerns ‘the right to be left alone’. Sometimes that enforceable context can be important, but in daily life it is mainly about ‘being safe, comfortable and protected in your own environment’. Our clients want to be able to decide for themselves who they will and will not allow in that environment. This also applies to the extent and the form in which they want to make information about themselves and/or their family available.

Reputation is another vulnerable concept that is very closely linked to privacy and security. On the one hand because it has often been built up over a long period of time and represents a considerable emotional, but also material value. On the other hand, because criminal minds abuse that very vulnerability through all kinds of threat and extortion scenarios.

Tridense will make an effort to bring the concepts of privacy, security and reputation into a practical and manageable relationship with each other. In this way, a solid foundation is laid for a sustainable security program.

Risk Assessment

Measures should at all times be tailored to the identified risk levels. In the first instance, therefore, we always prepare a contemplative report in which we set out our vision of the risk reality for the client. We do this on the basis of scenarios that we consider to be realistically conceivable. The purpose of such an analysis is twofold: firstly, we want to separate “sense and nonsense”. Secondly, we want to give content to the follow-up discussion with the client. In this way, we can discover together whether our point of view corresponds to the client’s risk perception and point of view. This will also provide insight into the way in which risks can occur, which factors influence them and how “danger signals” can be recognized in time. The usefulness and necessity of certain measures will thus become more tangible. The risk assessment is therefore an important and indispensable step in the creation of a good dialogue and a clear insight into the, possibly present, risk problems. After all, “only when you know how it works can you determine what you can do about it!”.

Risk perceptions and risk profiles can obviously change. Tridense constantly follows risk trends and the resulting scenario developments. The risk profile of the client (the family and individual family members) is therefore regularly reviewed.

Exposure on the Internet and in social media

‘Digital intelligence’ plays an important role in determining the risk profiles of our clients. In the presence on social media and the internet, details of one’s personal life are often ‘given away’. This is often done without being aware of the risks involved. From a risk perspective, the factors ‘findability’ and ‘traceability’ are central to this process. Information is often available online that criminals (and other malicious persons) can use to their advantage and cause considerable damage. Extortion, threats, robberies and even kidnappings often originate from this type of information. Organized crime is constantly and structurally on the lookout for such information.

Tridense monitors the digital profiles of its (individual) clients on a permanent basis. The purpose of this is to recognize possible ‘danger signals’ at the earliest possible stage, so that timely intervention is possible. This is based on a refined structure of search terms and dashboard formation. The client need not worry about his or her privacy in this process. On the contrary: the process is designed to optimally protect that privacy.